“Excuse me.”

Three friends and I were walking down a residential street, coming home after an hour of pool and ping pong at a hall whose main patrons seemed to be twelve-year-olds who were far too skilled at these games for their own good, and the bolder of whom smoked cigarettes–slowly and ostentatiously. An elderly man in a white jalabiyya stood before us, leaning on his cane. We stopped.

“I want to walk to the library. It is not far. But I cannot walk there.” He pointed to the street corner, his arm trembling slightly.

“Of course. No problem.” My friend John held out his arm and the man gladly took it. “What is your name?”

There was a long pause, as if the elderly man was searching his brain as if casting about for a lost keyring or pair of eyeglasses.

“My name…is Yahya.” Yahya is the Arabic name for John the Baptist.

“You speak excellent English. Where did you learn?” John asked. He was right. There is one sort of English that many shopkeepers have picked up, often single words or phrases useful to their trade, and often pronounced with a heavy Arabic accent and lots of gestures to shore up an unsure grasp of the language. Yahya did not speak like this at all. He spoke in complete sentences, and his accent, while a bit rusty, was not bad. There are also some Syrians who have learned English at university, but they are on the whole young and well-to-do….

“I studied in London,” Yahya said.

“That must have been a long time ago…when were you there?” John is from Reading, just west of London.

“I don’t remember.”

I couldn’t help smiling. Something about the very straightforward, honest answer was refreshing. Then Yahya had a thought.

“It was before 1950. I went to university in Paris in 1950.” Syria was only granted full independence in 1946. This man was older than the country he lives in. “I was an engineer. I am retired now.”

By then we had come to the corner store. “I want to buy something. Please wait.” He went inside and greeted the shopkeeper at length, as is obligatory in Arabic. John encouraged us to go on and he would catch up–progress had been slow.

John caught up to us back at my apartment. Yahya had in fact only wanted to go to the store. Perhaps he had forgotten the word for store and so used library instead. He turned out to be 76 years old, meaning he had gone to university in Paris at the age of 18, and London before that, and then he had returned to Syria. Most Syrians who are able to go to Paris or London today don’t come back.

Categories: Middle East, Summer 2008
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